Anna Karenina
ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her
herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the pinnacle
that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false, not
ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not
but feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his
elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his own falsehood. He
felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his sorrow, while he had
been base and petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own
humiliation before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a
small part of his misery. He felt unutterably wretched now, for his
passion for Anna, which had seemed to him of late to be growing cooler,
now that he knew he had lost her forever, was stronger than ever it had
been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had come to know her very
soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And
now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be
loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever,
leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful memory. Most
terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey
Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He
stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught, and did
not know what to do.
“A sledge, sir?” asked the porter.
“Yes, a sledge.”
On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without
undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying
his head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of
the strangest description followed one another with extraordinary
rapidity and vividness. First it was the medicine he had poured out for
the patient and spilt over the spoon, then the midwife’s white hands,
then the queer posture of Alexey Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the
bed.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of
a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at
once. And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he
began to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of
unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at once—it
was as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He
started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on
his arms got in a panic onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as
though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the
weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly
gone.
“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch’s words
and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its burning
flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him
but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish
and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away
from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the
sofa in the same position and shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut
he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the
memorable evening before the races.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her
memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how can
we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat
these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and
memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. But repeating
words did not check his imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily
rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind, and then his
recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice says. He takes
away his hands and feels the shamestruck and idiotic expression of his
face.
He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the
smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of
thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He
listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did
not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it,
did not make enough of it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said to himself. “Perhaps.
What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot themselves?”
he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw with wonder an
embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his brother’s wife. He
touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varya, of when
he had seen her last. But to think of anything extraneous was an
agonizing effort. “No, I must sleep!” He moved the cushion up, and
pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes
shut. He jumped up and sat down. “That’s all over for me,” he said to
himself. “I must think what to do. What is left?” His mind rapidly ran
through his life apart from his love of Anna.
“Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?” He could not come to a
pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no
reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his
belt, and uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up
and down the room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how
they shoot themselves ... to escape humiliation,” he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched
teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him,
turned it to a loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes,
his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of
thought, he stood with the revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and
clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion.
In reality this “of course,” that seemed convincing to him, was simply
the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through
which he had passed ten times already during the last hour—memories of
happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the
senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of
humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the
same.
“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed
again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and
pulling the revolver to the left side of his chest, and clutching it
vigorously with his whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist,
he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a
violent blow on his chest sent him reeling. He tried to clutch at the
edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered, and sat down on the
ground, looking about him in astonishment. He did not recognize his
room, looking up from the ground, at the bent legs of the table, at the
wastepaper basket, and the tiger-skin rug. The hurried, creaking steps
of his servant coming through the drawing-room brought him to his
senses. He made an effort at thought, and was aware that he was on the
floor; and seeing blood on the tiger-skin rug and on his arm, he knew
he had shot himself.
“Idiotic! Missed!” he said, fumbling after the revolver. The revolver
was close beside him—he sought further off. Still feeling for it, he
stretched out to the other side, and not being strong enough to keep
his balance, fell over, streaming with blood.
The elegant, whiskered manservant, who used to be continually
complaining to his acquaintances of the delicacy of his nerves, was so
panic-stricken on seeing his master lying on the floor, that he left
him losing blood while he ran for assistance. An hour later Varya, his
brother’s wife, had arrived, and with the assistance of three doctors,
whom she had sent for in all directions, and who all appeared at the
same moment, she got the wounded man to bed, and remained to nurse him.
Chapter 19
The mistake made by Alexey Alexandrovitch in that, when preparing for
seeing his wife, he had overlooked the possibility that her repentance
might be sincere, and he might forgive her, and she might not die—this
mistake was two months after his return from Moscow brought home to him
in all its significance. But the mistake made by him had arisen not
simply from his having overlooked that contingency, but also from the
fact that until that day of his interview with his dying wife, he had
not known his own heart. At his sick wife’s bedside he had for the
first time in his life given way to that feeling of sympathetic
suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of others, and
hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful weakness. And pity
for her, and remorse for having desired her death, and most of all, the
joy of forgiveness, made him at once conscious, not simply of the
relief of his own sufferings, but of a spiritual peace he had never
experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing that was the
source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy;
that what had seemed insoluble while he was judging, blaming, and
hating, had become clear and simple when he forgave and loved.
He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and her remorse.
He forgave Vronsky, and pitied him, especially after reports reached
him of his despairing action. He felt more for his son than before. And
he blamed himself now for having taken too little interest in him. But
for the little newborn baby he felt a quite peculiar sentiment, not of
pity, only, but of tenderness. At first, from a feeling of compassion
alone, he had been interested in the delicate little creature, who was
not his child, and who was cast on one side during her mother’s
illness, and would certainly have died if he had not troubled about
her, and he did not himself observe how fond he became of her. He would
go into the nursery several times a day, and sit there for a long
while, so that the nurses, who were at first afraid of him, got quite
used to his presence. Sometimes for half an hour at a stretch he would
sit silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy, wrinkled face of the
sleeping baby, watching the movements of the frowning brows, and the
fat little hands, with clenched fingers, that rubbed the little eyes
and nose. At such moments particularly, Alexey Alexandrovitch had a
sense of perfect peace and inward harmony, and saw nothing
extraordinary in his position, nothing that ought to be changed.
But as time went on, he saw more and more distinctly that however
natural the position now seemed to him, he would not long be allowed to
remain in it. He felt that besides the blessed spiritual force
controlling his soul, there was another, a brutal force, as powerful,
or more powerful, which controlled his life, and that this force would
not allow him that humble peace he longed for. He felt that everyone
was looking at him with inquiring wonder, that he was not understood,
and that something was expected of him. Above all, he felt the
instability and unnaturalness of his relations with his wife.
When the softening effect of the near approach of death had passed
away, Alexey Alexandrovitch began to notice that Anna was afraid of
him, ill at ease with him, and could not look him straight in the face.
She seemed to be wanting, and not daring, to tell him something; and as
though foreseeing their present relations could not continue, she
seemed to be expecting something from him.
Towards the end of February it happened that Anna’s baby daughter, who
had been named Anna too, fell ill. Alexey Alexandrovitch was in the
nursery in the morning, and leaving orders for the doctor to be sent